Martin Opršál - marimba, Pavel Šnajdr - conductor
Brno Contemporary Orchestra

The piece for solo marimba and chamber ensemble follows a set of solo pieces I released in the spring of 2021 under the title "Solos From Nothing". These were solo piano, solo electronics and then flute, cello and organ with electronics. With the exception of the piano sonata, all of these pieces in some way reflected a strange pandemic time, which for many creative people may happen to be a "time of nothing".
 The solo pieces were in many ways also a kind of compositional purification, and as such they gave rise to a new ensemble piece with marimba. The marimba - that haptic energetic object - landed in my home studio a year ago when it became clear that my 12-year-old son was going to study percussion. I'm grateful that this piece could emerge from the world of the marimba as a percussion, string and wind instrument, a horizon which the soloist Martin Opršál so wonderfully conveyed to me. The composition was graciously accepted by the Brno Contemporary Orchestra's conductor Pavel Šnajdr. The rest is personal in between of that "nothing" and the music itself.

Music From Nothing for marimba and ensemble

Live recording from the Ostrava Days performance, 29. 8. 2023
The Cathedral Of The Holy Saviour

Kamila Mazalová, Tereza Böhmová - voices
Canticum Ostrava - Jurij Galatenko
Ostravská banda with Bruno Ferrandis
(private documentary recording)

Načálo Polunóščnici for soli female choir, ensemble and electronics

Magdaléna Bajuszová - piano
Fama Quartet

The composition originates back in 2014. At that point I started to discover first cells of a musical language, which has stayed with me since that time. There were two main influences among others: composing soundtrack for the Czech TV historical series called Czech Century, and – probably at the first place – composing radiophonic composition with diaries by Pavel Kolmačka, the Czech poet and writer, who approached me with his strong poetics. But primarily his works pushed me into looking for new formal and harmonic solutions in music.
 At a certain point I realized Kolmačka’s diaries (with their span over one year / twelve months in a life) has grouped into twelve cells of a new harmonic terrain. I was about to combine 12-tone melodic series (based in historical models of twelve tone music) with spectral harmonic content build on top of them. Each of these twelve tones has suddenly existed as some kind of harmonic magnet, fundamental pitch for a new harmonic environment.

Since 2014 I have composed several pieces using this harmonic and formal approach. Long Sentence I. has happened as some kind of narration. It’s been a walk through untitled soundscape and I am very happy this has happened with a piece of pencil on a piece of paper, without electronic sound and computer processing, without big surround images or any kind of large performance gestures. Working on the piece quieted me down and I hope there can be imprints of this found in the composition.

Souvětí I. / Long Sentence I.

Ensemble Konvergence, cond. by Ondřej Štochl
When my album Spectral Shapes has been released in August 2012, there was no sleeve note included. Texts about pieces just take away energy off the sound and I want believe in sound as much as I can... the one, which is able to create images...

After more than three years I had opportunity to write piece entirely without electronics, a pure acoustic structure. For me this has been a kind of cleanup, right in a sense of the title.

My very personal feeling was I’ve had quite new music in front of myself, which guided me to places (particularly because of its form and rhythm), which I did not know before. I wish this would not be only feeling of mine ...

Go To The Light / Odejdi ke světlu

The piece was created during the period of my relatively massive compositional seeking, which I myself am probably still not able to define properly, yet it certainly pertains to a transformation in my perception of time and the sound colours within it. And is it also a testimony to the transformations of life roles, not only in the mirror of the family. I am delighted that the composition is performed and has been recorded by Eva Hutyrová, whose piano playing inspired its origination.

Running For Breath

Runnning For Breath for piano solo

Spatialis for ensemble and live electronics

Santa Rosa Symphony
Jan Mikušek - cimbalom
Bruno Ferrandis - conductor

The first session with Jan Mikušek happend in 2014, when performing together in a liturgical music performance on Palm Sunday in Prague. I organised cimbalom, viola da gamba, male vocalist and myself on life electronics to perform an electro-acoustic collage of a world instrument, period instrument, gregorian chant and computer based sound synthesis.

The experience with cimbalom revealed memories from walking down the streets of Berkeley in 2007 – 08, when conducting my post-doc research in CNMAT, UC Berkeley, meeting and listening the street cimbalom player Michael Masley every other day, particularly his strange finger-bows producing incredible sustained sound of this fascinating instrument. He inspired a special micro-bow, which we developed for the Temporis concerto.

In 2014 I worked on a large-scale radio composition with texts by Czech writer Pavel Kolmačka. For this work I was looking for some new way of organizing harmonic material in my music. At that time a new technique appeared which has become a new material world for me since than: in a stream of music there are twelve consecutive and always different harmonic centers, spectral fundamentals, upon which harmonic relation ships are organized. 

The liturgical work from 2014 came back into action. The sounds of cimbalom, viola da gamba and electronics unfolded into basic material, around which this radio work has emerged and has been shaped into twelve-tone-based harmonic series, following the diary-like structure of the text from January through December.

It was a story of time in a year, which grasped me. And the very new experience with cimbalom (either in live performace, or later in a studio work) has shaped an idea for writing concerto, a big challenge. 

In 2013 I composed an ensemble piece called Spatialis. The pieces deals with issues of sound and space, combining live ensemble with 8 loudspeakers set up in a spiral around and above listeners heads. The idea of space has been suddenly prolonged into another attribute of space, which is TIME. Thus Temporis began. 


It’s been directly connected to the sound material of the radio work from 2014. I analysed the sound material using the computer and kept the form of 12 consecutive parts featuring 12 different harmonic fundamentals: C#-D#-F#-A-G#-G-A#-B-D-F-E-C(/D). Starting with the longest / slowest part over the C fundamental each part becomes shorter until the last one of about 3 seconds only. 

Temporis tributes the cosmological time, its compression and expansion and its reflection in our own minds. The piece has been dedicated to Jan Mikušek, who discovered the cimbalom for me and also to my music mentor, Milan Slavický, who first taught me about time in music.

Special thanks to Bruno Ferrandis, who has believed to my music.

Temporis for cimbalom solo and large orchestra

The piece deals with the world of basic elements, which I feel resembles some of intimate realities within my mentality. The structure
of the piece was directly inspired by sounds of ﬁre, water drops and wind blowes, while ﬁre and drops themselves also represents big and
wonderful liturgical signs within Easter liturgy. For me this is polarity which I wanted to incorporate into the piece.
Elementary Me is dedicated to Monika Streitová (Michal Rataj)

Elementary Me (Monika Streitová - flute, 2013)

Corde, Lingua, Voce

Corde Lingua Voce (2006) for saxophones, organ and gregorian choir

Sonata (Almost Silent) for piano

Clarinet - Jindřich Pavliš

After couple of years I was encouraged to write a piece for solo instrument and live electronics. And after many years I took back a form of miniature series into my music world.
Writing a piece for Esther Lamneck was a challenge particularly facing her incredible performance virtuosity. Surprisingly it was more a feeling of calmness and lightness, which has been emphasized while working on this set of four very short electro-acoustic parts. For me this was like engraving pure clarinet sound with a bit of its electro-acoustic shadow – this is relationship I’ve tried to establish between the solo instrument and its live electronic extension.

Dedicated to Esther Lamneck

Small Imprints

The Long Sentence II. develops ideas I have worked on since around 2014. They derive from a form of a diary, which describes a live of a man during 365 days in a year. Twelve parts of the composition resembles twelve months of a year, but they also build up a large form, a unity of a multitude.

The piece was conceived as an electroacoustic sound performance. It features two violins, but also their virtual computer-based alter ego. It was inspired by the String Noise Duo, the two great performers, but it also resembles their presence on the stage in a multichannel loudspeaker system around the audience in a disembodied sound field.

Motivated by expressive performance abilities of the String Noise Duo I tried to build in an ongoing tension between pitch- and noise-based sound events, both on acoustic violins and inside there virtual computer mirroring.

The piece was commissioned and produced by the Czech Center New York and the Ostrava Days festival. 

My deep thanks to Ursula Eagly, who was originally supposed to work on the piece as a choreographer and dancer, for the fantastic discourse on music, dance and space.

Big thanks to Renata Spisarova, Petr Kotík, Barbara Karpetová and Petr Boháč for helping this cooperation to happen.

String Noise Duo
Pauline Harris - Conrad Kim Harris: violin
Michal Rataj – live electronics

Long Sentence II

Daan Vandewalle - piano, Bruno Ferrandis - conductor


Movis is a free sequel in a series of orchestral compositions, which thematize various aspects of listening to music. The composition Spatialis was written in 2013 and was premiered by the Berg Orchestra under the direction of Peter Vrábel. It focuses on spatial relationships in music: the tension between a chamber orchestra and the orchestra of speakers surrounding the listeners in the shape of a spiral. 2015 saw the creation of Temporis, the concerto for cimbalom and orchestra, with the solo part performed by Jan Mikušek. The piece was premiered at Ostrava Days 2015 (conductor Rolf Gupta) and was revived in 2018 as part of the Santa Rosa Sumphony’s seasonal subscription concert series (with Bruno Ferrandis). It thematizes the dimension of time in music, and how we listen to and perceive it. Movis delves into the theme of movement, at the rhythmic level as well as in the sense of an instrumental gesture, in relation to tempo and the mutual tension between the solo instrument and the orchestra. As if the piano was constantly trying to escape the totality of orchestral coordination, and wanted
6
to achieve independence and leave behind a trace of itself. Sometimes, it becomes the initiator of the movement, while at other times it leaps absolutely independently into the orchestral terrain, most notably in the concerto cadenza, which is completely improvised and in which the orchestra transforms itself under the conductor's control into a kind of scout observing the movement of the soloist. I was fascinated by a similar tension between precise compositional structure and amazing improvisational feats when I heard a performance of Frederic Rzewski’s piano composition The People United Will Never Be Defeated! played by Daan Vandewalle. The work on the piano concerto Movis was directly influenced by this experience and I am deeply honored that Daan Vandewalle has agreed to take on the solo part. The rest is up to the movement of the stars.
Movis is dedicated to Daan Vandewalle. A special thanks goes to Petr Kotík and Bruno Ferrandis.

MOVIS

Movis

It took a while before I could return to the flute as a solo instrument; however, the flute has been with me in various configurations throughout my entire composer career, and it is dear to my heart in many ways. Similarly, I have been closely associated with the flutist Monika Štreitová, who has played in a couple of my recent compositions. In this new piece, the flute radiates beams of sounds (hence the title); the electronic sounds turn into some kind of spatial reflection of the acoustic instrument, extending its physical identity and modifying the perspective of its spatial existence. The sharp penetrative flute sound full of life-giving breath gradually becomes a soothing round tone, enveloped in an ambient sound flow, an inseparable continuum. The form mostly refers to the cosmological ideas of movement acceleration and simultaneous space expansion – themes that I have been preoccupied with repeatedly over the last few years. I am very grateful to Monika for having initiated the new composition.

BEAMS

BEAMS for flute solo and electronic sounds (Monika Štreitová on flute)

Michal Rataj (born 1975) is composer, performer and sound designer based in Prague, Czech Republic. He composes mainly electroacoustic and chamber or orchestral instrumental music and receives performances throughout Europe and in the USA and broadcasts worldwide. Recently he has been active as real-time performer of his acousmatic music and he gives sound performances alone or with different music partners within a wide range of genres from sound art through contemporary jazz. He was commissioned by Swedish Radio, WDR, Czech Radio, Czech Television, Prague Philharmonia and Tonspur Vienna among others.

Rataj is associate professor of electroacoustic music at the Academy of Performing Arts and at the NYU in Prague. He studied musicology (Charles University, Prague) and composition (Academy of Performing Arts, Prague) with prof. Ivan Kurz and prof. Milan Slavický. He also went to study in Egham (Royal Holloway University of London, UK) and Berlin (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Universität der Künste) and as a Fulbright Scholar he conducted research in Center For New Music And Audio Technologies at University of California, Berkeley, CA in the academic year 2007 - 2008. 

He has worked as a radio producer at the Czech Radio since 2000, where he has produced over 100 original radioart works with artists from around the world. He was a member of the EBU Ars Acustica Group, his music has been broadcast worldwide and performed throughout Europe and in the USA.

Michal Rataj

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